Hole for a foreigner

In the summer of 1929 an unusual citizen appeared in Moscow. He was a foreigner and easily kept up conversations about Christ, Parisian tailors and Russian poetry. He was also a war correspondent, a supporter of Mussolini - and a great Italian writer. Here he met the Soviet aristocracy, which was not yet called the nomenclature, and fell in love with the girl Marika, with whom he walked around the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent.

The name of this citizen Kurzio Malaparte, and 20 years after his short visit to Moscow, he wrote the book “The Ball in the Kremlin” - the most strange and unreliable evidence of Moscow at that time. Now this book was first published in Russian, and it turned out that it was a hole in the world of Russian culture of early Soviet Russia. At the same time, there is practically no true episode in the book, but after all, culture is generally a fiction and a separate layer of reality.

Curcio Malaparte, nee Kurt-Erich Zukkert, was the son of a German and Italian, received a good education in an elite school in Prato, went to the First World War, there bravely fought in the Garibaldi squad against the Germans in France, after the war he lived in Poland, met there the future pope Pius XI, who in many years will send the priest dying Malaparte to the bed for confession.

Then Zukkert will support Mussolini and take a pseudonym - Malaparte. Nickname he has formed, focusing on Bonaparte, which means a good fate. But Bonaparte, as you know, did not win good fortune, and Zukkert decided that if you call yourself on the principle of the opposite, then everything will work out: Malaparte means a bad fate.

He lived in Paris, worked as a correspondent, sometimes sympathized with red, which made him fall out of favor with Mussolini and went to prison first, and then to exile. His link, however, took place in a favorite place of modern Russian oligarchs - Forte dei Marmi. Having finished his stay there, Malaparte bought a villa in which he languished while being exiled.

All his life - adventures, scandals, luxury and violent confrontation.

During World War II, Malaparte was sent by a reporter to the Eastern Front to capture the capture of Moscow: he liked the idea that Malaparte would enter Moscow — just as Bonaparte had once entered it. As we remember, those who took Moscow then did not succeed. Malaparte returns to Italy, catches the end of the era of fascism, deftly runs over to the British, then to the Americans, says he was out of favor with the Duce, because he always sympathized with the Communists and allies. In general, despite some fussiness, his fate, even after the war, develops quite happily - safe and well.

Curcio Malaparte died of lung cancer, he bequeathed his villa in Capri to the People's Republic of China, where he visited several years before his death. But relatives sued a monument of architecture in their favor.

Malaparte was known to us as the author of the novels “Kaput” and “Skin”, which describe war-ridden Europe. And Malaparte knew what he was writing about - he was such a real correspondent, burnt and scorched. Had and their experience of fighting.

But the novel, which came out in Russian only now, is devoted to another - the secular life of the high society of the Soviet Union in 1929.

There is an opinion that Bulgakov Woland was written off precisely with Curcio Malaparte - just as sinister.

Paradoxical and intelligent hero, powerfully standing out against the general background. This is possible. Judging by the novel Malaparte, he and Bulgakov spent a lot of time together in Moscow. We walked, talked, and already Soviet Bulgakov responded to each proposed topic with French pas la peine, which means "not worth it."

On one of these walks, Malaparte and Bulgakov meet an old prince of Lviv on Smolensky Boulevard, who carries a gilded chair on his head to sell it at a flea market. The prince, according to him, has five more such chairs at home, and this will help him survive the winter. The flea market, as Malaparte describes it, is a kind of secular salon, where all the “former” gather - people who speak French to each other and have preserved the manners of the pre-revolutionary aristocracy, but now have to sell for a pittance what was then realized in the main store elite Moscow - Torgsin.

And now Prince Lvov, whom the author represents as the last chairman of the State Duma, sits in his gilded chair in the middle of the boulevard and talks about the past.

The picture is amazing. But let me. After all, the last chairman of the State Duma was Rodzianko. And Prince Lvov was the first chairman of the Provisional Government. Moreover, they both left Russia safely four years before Kurzio Malaparte visited her.

What is this, the author is lying? Not lying, and inventing. All these inaccuracies are scrupulously collected and refuted by the scientific editor in the comments to the novel. It does not matter that Malaparte did not remember anything. It is important that he understood correctly.

In one of the episodes of the novel, the author speaks with Lunacharsky about the death of Mayakovsky, asks the People's Commissariat of Education for a pass to the room where the poet committed suicide. They say, among other things, about sacrifice and the need to bear the sacrifice - to die, because it is so intended. And in this conversation there is a phrase: "God is a murderer." Initially, Malaparte precisely wanted to name his novel about the Kremlin nobility.

Then they just arrested Kamenev, and Malaparte visits his wife. But in 1947, after the gulag and all those who died in the war, Malaparte, probably, had no one to come to.

He described everything inaccurately in fact, but he caught everything perfectly in texture.

For him it is important how Bulgakov talks to him and how disgusting Demian Poor is, he sees the death beauty of the Kremlin beauties - Madame Lunacharskaya and the ballerina Semenova, it is important for him what route the tram goes to Novodevichy Convent. And let him think that this is the 31st number, but in reality it was the 34th.

This is not so important.

It is important that, 30 years later, Malaparte was again traveling through Moscow and asked to be taken to the Novodevichy cemetery - he hoped that he would by chance meet his beloved Marika there.

Of course, not met. Because the Russian culture that attracted him so much is a hole in which it is impossible not to disappear.

The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.